Computational Biology

Dynamics of Virus-Host interaction

In the case of fast mutating viruses (e.g., Influenza virus), the virus-host interaction is driven by cross-immunity: after being infected by a strain, the host acquires immunity to a set of other strains antigenically similar to the infecting one (i.e., triggering the same host immune response). The evolutionary dynamics of viruses is therefore ruled by their relative antigenic distance. Can we understand the non trivial relation between antigenic and genetic distance?